The populations dwelling in this peninsula belong to very varied races.  On the south and south-west certain Semites had found an abode—­the mysterious inhabitants of Solyma, and especially the Phoenicians in their scattered trading-stations.  On the north-east, beside the Khati, distributed throughout the valleys of the Anti-Taurus, between the Euphrates and Mount Argseus, there were tribes allied to the Khati*—­possibly at this time the Tabal and the Mushka—­and, on the shores of the Black Sea, those workers in metal, which, following the Greeks, we may call, for want of a better designation, the Chalybes.

     * A certain number of these tribes or of their towns are to
     be found in the list contained in the treaty of Ramses II.
     with the Khati.

We are at a loss to know the distribution of tribes in the centre and in the north-west, but the Bosphorus and the Hellespont, we may rest assured, never formed an ethnographical frontier.  The continents on either side of them appear at this point to form the banks of a river, or the two slopes of a single valley, whose bottom lies buried beneath the waters.  The barbarians of the Balkans had forced their way across at several points.  Dardanians were to be encountered in the neighbourhood of Mount Ida, as well as on the banks of the Axios, from early times, and the Kebrenes of Macedonia had colonised a district of the Troad near Ilion, while the great nation of the Mysians had issued, like them, from the European populations of the Hebrus and the Strymon.  The hero Dardanos, according to legend, had at first founded, under the auspices of the Idasan Zeus, the town of Dardania; and afterwards a portion of his progeny followed the course of the Scamander, and entrenched themselves upon a precipitous hill, from the top of which they could look far and wide over the plain and sea.  The most ancient Ilion, at first a village, abandoned on more than one occasion in the course of centuries, was rebuilt and transformed, earlier than the XVth century before Christ, into an important citadel, the capital of a warlike and prosperous kingdom.  The ruins on the spot prove the existence of a primitive civilization analogous to that of the islands of the Archipelago before the arrival of the Phoenician navigators.  We find that among both, at the outset, flint and bone, clay, baked and unbaked, formed the only materials for their utensils and furniture; metals were afterwards introduced, and we can trace their progressive employment to the gradual exclusion of the older implements.  These ancient Trojans used copper, and we encounter only rarely a kind of bronze, in which the proportion of tin was too slight to give the requisite hardness to the alloy, and we find still fewer examples of iron and lead.  They were fairly adroit workers in silver, electrum, and especially in gold.  The amulets, cups, necklaces, and jewellery discovered in their tombs or in the ruins of their houses, are